The Dungeon Fairy: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (read novel full .txt) 📕

to a month made a massive difference in accumulating enough Core Improvement Points to improve her Level – and her Assistant Rank as well.  The rapid growth was going to end soon, however, as once she reached Core Improvement Level 5, the amount needed to grow to the next Level increased by 200 instead of by just 100, and would only increase even more every 5 Levels; not only that, but when she needed to progress to the Adept Assistant Rank, the amount needed to ascend to that Rank doubled – and then increased by 200 for subsequent stages.  Therefore, she could get to Novice Stage 5 for 400 Experience, but then it would require 800 to become an Adept Stage 1, then 1000 for Stage 2, and so on.  She didn’t even want to think about what it took to get to the Expert Rank, because that was going to be nearly impossible based on her current situation.  After that, the requirements increased significantly – as well as taking a lot longer for the countdown.

She could Improve her Core a bit faster than her Assistant Rank over the next couple of months, but unless she got her dungeon up and running soon, she’d hit a wall in the amount she could squeeze by with.  There was no way she was going to attempt to put more than 800 Confusion Enchantment Traps in her current dungeon, which was why she needed to finish it soon and open it up for Raiders to invade.  She’d receive CIPs just by having them inside her dungeon – depending on the amount of time spent there – and if she somehow killed one, then she would receive even more – though with the 95% reduction, Raider deaths wouldn’t benefit her as much as they would normally.

Regardless of what would happen in the future, she now had some choices to make on how to spend her Core Improvement Points.  What she chose now would shape the immediate future of her dungeon, especially since she probably wasn’t going to have many more CIPs until she opened up completely.

Core Improvements

Available Core Improvement Points (CIP)

500

0 in 30 days

Improvement Name

Value

Cost (CIP)

Maximum Dungeon Force Increase

+500 DF

200

Dungeon Force Regeneration Increase

+5 DF per minute

200

Control Limit Increase

+50

100

Select Additional Creature

1

250

Select Additional Creature Variant

1

25

Select Additional Trap Specialization

1

300

Select Additional Environment Access

1

400

Reward Tier Increase

1

100

Convert CIPs to SCPs

1 SCP

4

Again, as she expected, the cost in CIPs to increase her maximum Dungeon Force and regeneration was more; whereas they were each 50 before, now they were 200.  It was the way the system worked, unfortunately – each time you purchased an Improvement, the more expensive the next purchase would be.  The only thing on the list that didn’t change no matter how much you did it was the conversion of Core Improvement Points to Special Characteristic Points – that stayed exactly the same with a 4-to-1 ratio.

There were benefits to doing that conversion, of course, and Tacca was pretty sure that she’d have to do it at some point in order to get rid of her negative Special Characteristics; she only received 25 SCPs every time she raised her Core Improvement Level, so unless she wanted to wait until she was Level 23 (which was a long way away), she’d have to sacrifice some of her precious CIPs.  Right now, though, the conversion wouldn’t do much good – she’d much rather use her Points on something that could help immediately.

Increasing her potential options with more Dungeon Force was imperative, so she spent 400 of her 500 Points on raising it to a maximum of 1,500 and an additional 5 per minute regeneration.  When those were purchased, she saw that the next cost for each was 500 – so that wasn’t going to happen for a little while.  With her remaining 100 CIPs, Tacca spent them on increasing her Control Limit by 50 – which would greatly help to populate her dungeon when she was ready.

Tacca then turned to her Assistant side of her new form, though she paused after a moment to realize something: she hadn’t blacked out due to her Core Improvement Level increasing.  I guess that was only temporary.  Looking at her Core from the outside, she noticed that all but one tiny crack had been repaired; she figured that the initial damage just after she was sucked into the Dungeon Core had been far greater than she knew, and that was the reason for the period of unconsciousness.  Now that she was basically repaired, there was no need for knocking her out, apparently.

Dungeon Assistant Information

Assistant Name:

Tacca GloomLily

Assistant Rank:

Novice

Assistant Stage:

4/5

Experience:

12/400

Experience Pending/Countdown:

0 in 1 Month

Fairy Mana (FM):

200/200

Fairy Mana Regeneration:

9 per minute

Abilities:

Bond

Instant – Multiple

50+ FM

Translocation

Instant

1000 FM

Healing Aura

Sustainable

20 FM per minute

Hibernate

Sustainable

1 FM per minute

Invisibility

Sustainable

3 FM per minute

Repellant Shield

Sustainable

2 FM per minute

Tacca’s increase in her Novice Rank Stage provided her with a brand-new Ability: Healing Aura.  She had been worried that her changed circumstances would prevent her Assistant system from automatically teaching her how to use it, but fortunately she was wrong; as soon as she thought about it, she knew how to activate it as well as information on what it could do.

The Healing Aura was for healing herself – at least it would if she were still a Fairy, though she wasn’t sure how it would work with her Core – and anything around her for 10 feet in every direction.  It required 20 Fairy Mana every minute to sustain, which was quite a lot; however, it would rapidly heal the injuries from minor cuts and scratches within a minute, as well as